My father was offering a choice, but it wasn’t a simple one. His question wasn’t Will you stay here with me? That decision had been made months before. What he wanted to know was if I could love this life as he did. If I could give my heart to this place, even if she never returned and I had no mother going forward, perhaps not ever.
How could I begin to answer? All around us, half-empty cupboards reminded me of the things that used to be there but weren’t any longer—four china teacups with gold-painted rims, a card game, amber beads clicking together on a necklace my mother had loved. Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn’t know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me. He pulled me—long limbed and a little dirty, as I always seemed to be—onto his lap, and we sat like that quietly for a while. From the edge of the forest, a group of hyraxes echoed shrieks of alarm. One of our greyhounds cocked a sleek ear and then settled back into his comfortable sleep by the fire. Finally my father sighed. He scooped me under my arms, grazed my drying tears with a quick kiss, and set me on my own two feet.
Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for “beginnings.” But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along. My mother’s going was like that for me, though I didn’t realize it straight away. For a long time, I could only feel confused and hurt and terribly sad. Were my parents still married? Did my mother love us or miss us? How could she have left me behind? I wasn’t ready to go to my father with these questions. He wasn’t all that soft as fathers go, and I didn’t know how to share such private and wounded feelings.
Then something happened. In and beyond the Mau Forest on our land, several Kipsigis families lived in mud-and-wattle huts surrounded by high thorn bomas. Somehow they saw what I needed without my asking. One of the elders swept me up, murmuring a string of charmed words, and tying a cowrie shell ceremoniously to my waist. It swung on a leather thong and was meant to resemble the closed cowrie shell between my own legs and to ward off evil spirits. When a Kip girl was born, they did this. I was the white daughter of their white bwana, but something unnatural had happened that needed setting to rights. No African mother would ever have thought to abandon a child. I was healthy, you see, not maimed or weak. So they stamped out that first start and gave me another as Lakwet, meaning “very little girl.”
I was thin and knock-kneed with unruly white-blonde hair, but my new name and place soon helped to toughen me. Running up and down our hill to the Kip village, my feet quickly turned to leather. Portions of our land that had frightened or intimidated me before became as familiar as the zebra skins that covered my bed. When the daylight bled away, I would climb under the skins and watch the houseboy pad soundlessly into my room on bare feet to light the hurricane lamp. Sometimes the sudden flare and hiss sent skinks in the hut walls flitting into hiding, the sound of them like sticks against straw. Then came the changing of the guard as the daylight insects—hornets and mason flies—tucked into mud nests in the rounded walls, and the crickets woke, sawing in a rhythm only they knew. I would wait an hour or more like this, watching shadows twist over the furniture in my room, all made of paraffin boxes and all the same until the shadows rounded and changed them. I listened until I couldn’t hear my father’s voice any more, and then I’d slip out of an open window into the inky dark to join my friend Kibii around a low spitting fire in his hut.
Kibii’s mother and the other women drank a murky tea made of bark and nettles and spun out their tales of how everything had come to be. I learned most of my Swahili there, more and more eager for stories…how the hyena had got his limp and the chameleon his patience. How the wind and rain had once been men before they failed at some important task and were banished to the heavens. The women themselves were wizened and toothless, or supple as polished ebony, with long-muscled limbs under pale shukas. I loved them and their tales, but I wanted more to join Kibii and the other totos who were becoming warriors, young morani.